September 5, 2008

A late-night fatal stabbing outside a State Street-area bar Wednesday comes at a time when Madison police have beefed up their presence to combat a wave of alcohol-fueled crime that has Downtown residents and UW-Madison students on edge.

The latest incident — Madison's sixth murder of the year — claimed the life of Juan J. Bernal, 22, of Madison. Police said Bernal was not a student.

Madison police responded to an area outside the Plaza Tavern and Grill, 319 N. Henry St., around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday after a report of a stabbing and later arrested Justin R. Stout, 31, of Madison....

Plaza Tavern owner Dean Hetue said his staff told him the two arrested men left the bar, then waited outside for Bernal. He was stabbed right outside the bar's front door after he came out to have a cigarette, Hetue said....

The Plaza Tavern is in an area including State Street where Madison police have launched an effort to control alcohol-related crime and disorder. The Downtown Safety Initiative, which began this spring, employs officers working overtime in targeted areas on selected Friday and Saturday nights to patrol the vibrant State Street area, which draws a sometimes-volatile mixture of drunken students, the homeless and criminals seeking easy prey.

The program was developed in response to an increase in violent street crime Downtown, including a disturbing pattern of weekend bar-time muggings of male college students in the spring of 2006 and the murder the following year of UW-Whitewater student Kelly Nolan, 22. Nolan disappeared after she left a State Street bar in June 2007. Her body was found about three weeks later south of Madison in the town of Dunn.

Madison Police Capt. Mary Schauf said there were no extra officers on duty Wednesday night because "Wednesday night is not one of the nights that's normally targeted for extra resources."

So what do you think, Madison people? Are the police doing enough? I'm not swallowing the it was Wednesday excuse.

apparently Chicago has had more folks killed this Summer than we lost in Iraq. Perhaps an Obama adminstration should redeploy the Army to do house to house searches on the South side. Maybe do a raid on the Insurgents holed up at Rev Wright's place.

Joe Biden's solution to the violence in Iraq, was to partition the country into three states. Kurd, Suni and Shite. As usual he had a brilliant idea, so here goes with Madison... separate the city into three zones, smokers, students and knifers.

So does Madison want to double the number of community organizers with blue uniforms and guns? You are using overtime to put "extra" boots on the ground now. (Or are the uniforms brown? I haven't lived in Madison since 1988, and I forget.)

As a resident, this news is very disturbing. I think you can rule out the Wednesday excuse. That mix of drunken students, the homeless and criminals is as old as the hills, though the stakes are higher with the emerging empty-nester condo market.

My little town has seen a similar upsurge in violence this year. In the past, shootings were rare, and murders moreso. In the past two months there have been shootings (plural) every day or every other day, mostly in my neighborhood.

Why?

Whenever I have written posts here at Althouse or elsewhere that talk about the decline of civilization and the rise of barbarism, I get mocked. But it's becoming glaringly obvious that barbarian behavior is increasing (even though we're told that -statistically- crime is down).

So to me the question is why is civilized behavior disappearing?

But then people think I'm nuts for asking it.

Anyway, what to do about the murders in Madison?Arm yourself. There aren't enough cops, and won't be, unless you post national guard troops two to a block, day and night.Why?Because the populace, or a significant number, is no longer civil, but murderous.

Kids carry knives more than ever. Cops are mostly reactive. Insofar as this is the Madison's police "fault" -- which I reject completely -- the Wed. argument is just fine. Deterrence by presence is not absolute -- especially for someone who's drunk angry and armed.

They do their crime stats and their crime maps and calendars and they put the most officers where they will get the most coverage. If Wed. is a historically quiet night -- then there will be light coverage. Unless the city funds more overtime or hires more cops what else can they do?

It's the same reason why it takes forever to find a cop in the "good" part of almost any town and why you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cop in dicier parts of town -- generally. They go where the crime.

The story should be there are only 6 murders this year. That ain't bad at all.

See, if you ahd effective community organizers in Madison the violence would be reduced. They would go door to door with petitions, gathering signatures to close all the bars; they are a breeding ground for violence, and well, it is better if people just drink at home. (Paul Buttinsky 1956)

They would troop through the streets at night looking for people weilding knives and try to talk to them and convince them that knife weilding has not future. They would be part of a grant supported group called Cease Stabbing.

They would protest and demand that smoking be outlawed on the public way after dark. With a grant from the Abrmahoff Challenge.

They would assauge the fears of the students and try to enlist them in their cause. They would get them to march through the streets and hold candle light vigils.

One would eventually run for president and use community organizing as executive experience.

You guys need to get a grip. They are part of any solution or problem. Drunks, youths and the homeless do commit a lot if violent crime katherine -- that is beyond question. It's not an "excuse" -- it's the way it is.

Why is this even a story? Two drunk dudes get in a fight and one gets stabbed? What the hell is surprising about that? That story is as old as dudes, drink and shiny sharp objects.

Eventually even the dumbest thugs begin to realize that thug-on-thug violence is a lot harder to make money on, and more dangerous to them to rob, etc. - than easier prey in wealthy districts like Georgetown in DC or college towns.

Civilzation is indeed slipping down. Europe, Australia now have whole swaths of "no-go areas" - and are also seeing the underclass slip out of their neighborhoods at night to hunt prey elsewhere. No different than two gang-banger hunters slipping out of Durham and looking for a blonde Eve Carson in Chapel Hill to get, rob, rape, then kill. Or the string of thugs lying in wait to mug and attack college students in many cities.

The issue is not guns, knives, illicit drugs or underage drinking.

It's the thugs and what needs to be done to make them again scared shitless that if they are caught, their lives will be incredibly miserable and unpleasant existences afterwards, with huge non-pleable sentence adders for use of a lethal weapon.

As an example, yesterday in Long Island City in Queens, a woman saw a homeless guy hanging around her block trying to see what he could steal. She called her next door neighbor a 67 year old retired man to ask him to walk her to the car.

As he did the homeless crack addict tried to rob them, the guy resisted and the skell beat him to death. Now if they had run a sweep and profiled, harassed and arrested this piece of shit, that grandfather would be alive today and a woman could walk to her car in front of her house without fear.

No system is perfect, but the farther we get away from Giuliani time the tougher it will be. Just sayn'

No sweat Pogo. It's pretty easy to pick out the skells and the people who are going to commit crimes. If you arrest them for pissing in the street you can stop them from stabbing someone or kicking them to death. And it's not a racial thing either. A motor head meth dealer should be rousted just as fast as hippty hopping gang banger or a cholo with his Chevy bouncing down the avenue. People know who the skells are, but it is the interference of the yuppie, liberal, do-gooders who stop the cops from doing what they have to do to make the streets safe. That's what Madison is filled with, it seems to me based on it's reputation and what the professor has written about on this blog. So until the tide of violence is big enough, nothing will happen. It takes a big disaster till corrective action takes place. You know like Hurricane Katrina. Or David Dinkins.

In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner state that the crime drop in the '90s was due to: Increase size of police force; Roe v. Wade.

They make a compelling case that Giuliani's policies didn't have a measurable effect on crime, by removing the effect of the additional police (which increase started before Giuliani) and the reduction seen in all major metropolitan areas.

That isn't to say that the "broken windows" approach doesn't have merit. But it's a good idea to look at their work before getting too excited about it.

Statistics, shamtistics. Figures lie and liars figure. I don’t believe in any academic study made by liberal college professors with an agenda and an axe to grind. Crime only got under control when we had the political will to stand up to the pressure groups and Al Sharpton. The police were demoralized and ineffective when Dinkins was mayor. Any other spin is pure and utter bullshit. No better example then Crown Heights where the rioter’s were allowed to “vent” and the police response was muted. Revisionist history and the “Big Lie” is that Dinkins was interested in getting criminals off the street. But I have no doubt you can find reams upon reams of academic studies and liberal tomes to tell you that. Just like the Democrat’s were always behind our efforts in the Cold War even though they opposed every move that led to the fall of the Soviet Union. “It was inevitable. Nothing that Reagan did was important.” Opposing effective crime techniques like stop and frisk and profiling is what lowered crime. Yeah that’s the ticket.

In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner...1. forgot that correlation is not causation.

2. ignored that the teen homicide rate tripled in the first cohort born after Roe v. Wade (so they got correlation wrong anyway)

3. From the WSJ:"The Boston Fed's Mr. Foote says he spotted a missing formula in the programming of Mr. Levitt's original research. He argues the programming oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect disappeared. [Emphasis mine.]

" There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term," the authors assert in the report. Their work doesn't represent an official view of the Fed."

It's like Sean Connery in the Untouchables... we all know who the majority of the trouble makers in our communities are -- because of the law, political correctnessfear, apathy, etc. we do not hound them out of our communities or pressure them into acting right.

Stay IN people. If Madison isn't safe, no where is safe. Even home isn't safe, but it's better than the streets. It's sad that kids think they need to go out and wonder around or drink at the bars to entertain themselves. It's nothing but trouble. . . the streets aren't safe anymore . . .that's the bottom line.

So according to some of the morons who post here, facts and evidence equals "academic studies made by liberal college professors with an agenda and an axe to grind." And crime began to drop after Rudy got Sharpton under control.

You really can't make this stuff up. Its enough to make me want to pull my car over to the side of the road and weep.

And also, no."Academic studies" made by liberal college professors with an agenda and an axe to grind are most often devoid of facts and evidence; as in Freakonomics, refutations of which I cited but you did not read.

You just named the last gasp of the Democratic stand against communism. And after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the liberal intelligentsia went full Monty Marxist, behavior which persists even unto the present day.

At least liberals have an intelligentsia, when are you guys going to get one?

Oh wait, I forgot--

"The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. …"

Trooper, I don't think these guys have an axe to grind. Which isn't to say they're right.

Pogo, thanks for the link: I knew there were rebuttals out there but I just finished reading the book (and, yes, finding fault). I don't think it's fair to say they forgot correlation is not causation; I think they thought they had eliminated all the other possible causes and then leapt to the wrong conclusion.

I would also note that they specifically say that it's neither here-nor-there as far as the abortion debate goes. So, I think the approach was honest.

I also think what we all are (or should be) interested in is finding out the real causes.

What I'm not convinced of is that this isn't just a fluke vs. "SOMETHING TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT".

The psychiatrist Foster Cline (Parenting with Love and Logic) noted that we crossed a milestone in the 1990s. We finally became more likely to be killed by a stranger than by a family member. His basic argument is that a baby's first job, the occupation of its first 16 months, the most critical task it will ever undertake, is to learn to trust. For that it needs a caregiver who responds reliably and lovingly when it expresses a need or a discomfort.

What you get when a baby cannot complete the first fundamental task that makes it a human is a goblin - someone who can cap a 'shroom without a qualm, a regret, a twinge of conscience. There've been a lot of societal trends getting between the loving caregiver and the baby.

Hey maybe they can do a study and prove that it isn't the disadvantaged yutes but the drunken frat boys like the ones that got off raping that poor working mother who had to pay her way through community college by showing off her twat. See if you can find anybody with a pointy head and a corduroy jacket with elbow patches. He's probably on the side of the road weeping.